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Though this is a city and there is a freeway feeder out front down which continuous commuter traffic rushes in a manic homicidal flood, we live in the shade of three enormous redwoods. The redwoods mean life. The largest redwood is a hundred feet high and towers over this crumbling old house. It was born as a potted plant won as a prize at the San Francisco International Exposition of 1906 by a woman who owned this hillside then. It is an ecology in and of itself; it is home to many and various critters, raccoons, squirrels, and bugs of all sorts. Its root system is as broad in diameter as its great russet trunk is tall. These water-seeking subterranean roots grow to the size of a man's thigh; they are pumping in the water that nourishes the redwood world. The tree sends out tiny intelligent tendrils which radiate through the earth until they find moisture to feed the system. Back in the day when I was capable of physical activity, I got to know those roots very well, because the tendrils inveigled themselves into our drainpipes, working industriously down there in the dark, which forced us to dig great laborious holes into the hard ground. I learned then that Sequoia sempervirens is a being of not only majestic beauty and grandeur of stature, but of tremendous capacity for transforming the immediate environment into nutrients that sustain life of an order of complexity beyond anything we could ever aspire to. Living under these trees has its problems, the great branches defy such dwarfish obstacles as power lines and the accumulation of debris is terrific, last week big offshore winds brought down a rain of needles which clogged the drains... and at the moment as I type these words an intense downpour generated by the first serious storm of the season is causing the saturated and happy boughs to droop and drip with joy.

In short, they too extend their thanks. They're having a good day. A rainforest wants nothing more than to be rainforest.

The message left no questionabout how to proceed--it is rainforest duty to goout into the elementssee what is happeningwith the Beatsand their liketheir wrapped-up daysmaking it through the stormroots as largeas a man's thigh.

The old grouse has been grousing and shaking with sooty green tongue beneath the feverish coverlets yay all through the day into the night, the silence punctuated only by intermittent coughing, a few unbearable radio-in-the-dark moments of The Debate (our would-be Next Leader, the sacred underwear guy, reassuring us "we've got Israel's back, culturally" -- now there's a relief, cough cough!), and then, through the rain, our neighbour, out beneath the redwood, calling one of his cats that had got off somewhere to shelter from the deluge...

Rainforest microclimates are wonderful, if you're a Sequoia sempervirens.

These giants make me laugh, they are young and fragileupwards of 2000 years old, I worry about them, will they survive?Here are more of them than I had hopedBut the odds against them are huge as themselves.